Linked List: November 2007

Friday, 30 November 2007

Immortalized in the Washington’s Smithsonian Institution as “America’s Legendary Daredevil”, Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980.

Something tells me the Zune will be a popular Christmas gift this holiday season. The player is currently Amazon’s top-selling music player, beating out the new iPod Nano and the 80GB iPod on the “Bestsellers in Electronics” list.

Amazon’s best-seller lists are updated frequently, so it’s possible this was true when she wrote this, but as I type this, the best-selling Zune is behind seven iPod models.

Update: Apparently last year’s brown 30 GB Zune held the top spot at Amazon a few weeks ago after they dropped the price on them to $90. Perhaps Hughes will be buying more of them for all her friends and family this holiday season.

Kottke pretty much nails it with his short write up of the Eye-Fi — an SD memory card with built-in Wi-Fi networking. I tested one from Photojojo for a week, too, and came to a similar conclusion. It’s sort of amazing, technically, but ultimately it’s really only useful if you want to use an online photo site like Flickr as your primary photo library. If you prefer to use something like iPhoto or Lightroom, Eye-Fi is needless.

The equation appears to be a counterexample to a famous mathematical
statement, Fermat’s Last Theorem. Pierre de Fermat had proposed the
theorem in 1637, and a proof had only recently been discovered when
the episode aired. Cohen wrote a computer program to find
near-misses for Fermat’s Last Theorem, equations that were close
enough to being true that a person who tapped it into a calculator
would be fooled.

Thursday, 29 November 2007

So tonight’s Cowboys-Packers game — the first regular season game between two 10-1 teams in 17 years — is only being broadcast on the NFL Network, a channel that Comcast (and other major cable providers like Time-Warner) don’t include in their regular line-up. So I can’t watch this game without coughing up an extra $5 a month on top of the $120/month I’m already paying. Fucking bastards, all of them, according to this report on the situation from NPR.

So here’s what Amazon went and did. Metaphorically, the company invented a humanoid robot capable of autonomous action. Every day at 4 a.m., it gets in your car and drives all over the state, buying fruit, milk, butter, eggs and other staples straight from the farm. By the time you wake up and trudge into the kitchen, there’s a steaming plate of waffles waiting for you, made from scratch, and topped with fresh-picked strawberries and whipped cream.

It’s one of the most awesome consumer products ever. It might even be a landmark moment in technology. … and Amazon is promoting it as a $399 waffle maker.

Moore’s Law suggests that every component of a PC halves in price on a roughly 18-month cycle. A desktop PC today should be roughly 100 times as powerful as a desktop PC of similar price 10 years ago, and 50 times as powerful as a PC of eight and a half years hence. A naive soul with no prior experience of consumer capitalism might ask why, instead of doubling in power, the manufacturers don’t concentrate on cutting prices? But that’s not how the industry worked. Until now.

Disturbing story of an Indonesian man afflicted with a skin condition that results in tree-like growths covering his body. I’ve never seen anything like it. (Update: I’ve changed the link to a later story, which includes the news that doctors are hopeful they can help him.)

New software from Google, lets you run Google gadgets as Mac OS X Dashboard widgets. It’s an interesting idea, as it sort of attempts to turn Google Desktop into a cross-platform meta platform for HTML/CSS/JavaScript *-dgets, but my first thought is that it seems needless. Looking at Google’s developer docs for writing cross-platform gadgets, it really looks lowest-common-denominator. If you’re a developer with a Google gadget that you want Mac users to run, I think it makes more sense to port it to a native widget, which will let all Mac users run it, rather than only those who’ve got Google Desktop installed.

(Speaking of cross-platform “widgets”, I don’t hear much about Yahoo Widgets (née Konfabulator) these days. Just me?)

Wednesday, 28 November 2007

Rainer Brockerhoff’s new €7 (roughly $10) utility that restores hierarchical pop-up menus for folders in the Leopard Dock. It’s implemented with an app that runs in the background — no hacks. The only downside (vs. the old 10.0-10.4 Dock menus) is that you can’t drop items onto Quay’s folder icons to move or copy items into the corresponding folder. (Well, Michael Tsai notes one other downside: the menus only appear on mouse-up, not mouse-down.) Quay makes up for it with a bunch of options that the Dock’s old built-in menus didn’t offer. Definitely worth a look if you miss hierarchical folder menus in the Dock.

On Moneymaking argues that it’s a good thing that Amazon’s Kindle is ugly:

6. You Can Be Pretty Later

The Kindle is ugly. It’s nothing like the iPhone, where people
bought it just to show off the slick interface to their friends.
Instead, Amazon focused on creating a product that does exactly what
it’s supposed to do: give you nationwide access to over 80,000 books
in the palm of your hand. They can make it pretty later.

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Tuesday, 27 November 2007

Update to Objective Development’s launcher/miscellaneous utility. (I never know how to categorize LaunchBar and Quicksilver.) Interesting new features include support for .scptd AppleScript bundles (great for packing up AppleScripts with self-contained shell script resources for “do shell script” calls out the shell) and an “argument” parameter for custom x-launchbar:execute search templates that lets you pass in large strings as input without worrying about escaping them for the shell.

Major upgrade to Panic’s $29 utility for customizing and organizing icons; now includes Pixadex’s features. Leopard-only, and includes all sorts of Leopard-specific features, like support for 512-pixel icons, and resources to change the appearance of your Dock.

From Seth Mnookin’s excellent profile of Doug Morris in Wired, regarding the music industry’s inability to deal with the digital download revolution:

Morris insists there wasn’t a thing he or anyone else could have
done differently. “There’s no one in the record company that’s a
technologist,” Morris explains. “That’s a misconception writers
make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They
didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do. It’s like if you were
suddenly asked to operate on your dog to remove his kidney. What
would you do?”

Personally, I would hire a vet. But to Morris, even that wasn’t an
option. “We didn’t know who to hire,” he says, becoming more
agitated. “I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology
person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past
me.” Morris’ almost willful cluelessness is telling. “He wasn’t
prepared for a business that was going to be so totally disrupted
by technology,” says a longtime industry insider who has worked
with Morris. “He just doesn’t have that kind of mind.”

Kind of obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention, but it’s telling that Morris still doesn’t regret not hiring someone who understood what was going on back in 1999 or 2000. I suppose it’s more likely that he does regret it, but is unwilling to admit it. (Via Vulture.)

In short, electronic “books” are nothing of the sort, and if Kindle aims to be an electronic substitute (replacement?) for the “book,” then it has missed the mark by a mile. The basic problem with the current e-book + reader combination is twofold: the single-page format, and the lack of ready markup and annotation features.

Nifty AppleScripts from Jesse Newland for managing Spaces’s application assignments (e.g. “assign this app to space 2”). These scripts let you manage these assignments without going into the Spaces panel in System Prefs.

Grep alternative written in Perl, so it uses Perl’s (superior) regular expressions. Ack is smart about things like .svn directories, skipping them by default, and it comes with a bunch of command-line switches that make it easy to filter the files you’re searching by file type.

Through the Mozilla Foundation, we’re now able to accept tax-deductible donations that will go toward the development and advancement of Camino. What’s more, through the end of the year the Mozilla Foundation will match 2 to 1 every dollar donated (up to $10,000). Donating now makes your dollar go three times as far as it normally would. You can read more about their new directed giving program from Frank Hecker’s blog post.

Camino is a terrific Mac application — far more Mac-like and Mac-specific than the Mac version of Firefox. This 2-to-1 contribution matching is a great opportunity to encourage further Camino development.

Heise Security reports how Leopard Mail is vulnerable to email attachments masquerading as the wrong type. For example, a shell script named “Foo.jpg”, but which has a resource fork item assigning the file to Terminal, will be displayed by Leopard Mail as a JPEG image, but will open and execute in Terminal — without any warning or prompt — if you double-click it from Mail. Oddly, you do get a warning on subsequent attempts to open the attachment within Mail — it only executes in Terminal without warning the first time. Even worse, this same vulnerability was closed by Apple before, in Tiger, but has returned in Leopard.

Sunday, 25 November 2007

My thanks to Griffin for sponsoring last week’s DF RSS feed. Griffin’s brand-new Evolve wireless sound system is now available, and it’s pretty sweet. (Griffin sent me a demo unit.)

Here’s the short version: The base station has an iPod port, charging pads for the speakers, and a few simple audio and video in/out ports on the back. It’s super-simple to set up and start using. The speakers are completely wireless — just pick them up and put them wherever you want, up to 150 feet away from the base station. The remote control works via RF, so it doesn’t need line-of-sight to the base station — at my house the remote’s range is at least equal to the range of the speakers. To my ears, audio quality is equivalent to that of a typical (wired) shelf unit — not much bass and far “smaller” than what you get from a real stereo, but way better than any wireless speakers I’ve ever heard.

Saturday, 24 November 2007

Email-based “personal assistant” from Values of N, the makers of Stikkit. Sign up for a free account and you get a unique email address, to which you send commands like “Remind me I have a marketing meeting on 3/14 at 1-2pm”. (Via Matt Wood.)

JWZ reveals the hidden Dock pinning prefs — instead of centering the Dock, you can pin it to the left or right (on the bottom), or top or bottom (on the side). I’ve been using this ever since 10.0, but it’s one of those hidden prefs many people don’t know about.

Sadly, it now appears that Apple’s engineers have broken this in Mail 3.0 in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5). The various sound effects played by Mail when receiving or sending mail are now again played through the default output, instead of the output for sound effects and alerts.

Short AppleScript by Macworld pooh-bah Jason Snell to take the frontmost URL from Safari, pass it to Metamark, and put the resulting short URL on the clipboard, ready for pasting. The download is an AppleScript app, but you can open it in Script Editor and re-save as a compiled script easily.

Thursday, 22 November 2007

Wednesday, 21 November 2007

As the variable background of the X.5 menu bar means that characters have to be drawn on a transparent background and then put on the modified desktop menu bar picture, this also means that no sub-pixel anti-aliasing is used. As a consequence you may find that certain glyphs look irregularly rendered or poorly spaced in the menu bar.

There’s a growing trend of indie developers publishing sales numbers for their apps. Ken Case on the just-released-as-public-beta OmniFocus:

I just wanted to write a quick note to thank you all for your support! In less than five days, we’ve already received over $100,000 in preorders for OmniFocus, making this one of our strongest product launches of all time.

At $40, that’s over 2500 licenses. Compare and contrast with Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper, which Jesse Grosjean reported sold 170 licenses in its first four days.

T-Mobile Germany announced this morning that it would begin selling iPhones without a contract or a SIM lock that would restrict the device to its network. Those SIM-unlocked iPhones will be available starting today, in fact, but they won’t run cheap. T-Mobile is selling them for €999 (just under US$1,500).

Everybody is talking about how Kindle is the ‘iPod of Books’ or something like that, but the iPod is so yesterday (even Apple knows it). If Amazon really wanted a breakthrough, they should have aimed for the ‘iPhone of Books’.

Tuesday, 20 November 2007

The trouble is, web design, although it employs elements of graphic design and illustration, does not map to them. If one must compare the web to other media, typography would be a better choice. For a web design, like a typeface, is an environment for someone else’s expression.

But the digerati don’t get it and don’t like it and that creates a compelling investment opportunity to buy Amazon shares now. The stock market doesn’t appreciate this game changer. Kindle will be the iPod of books — you read it here first.

I say the difference is that the iPod allowed you to easily play the music you already owned, and that you could (and can to this day) buy music to play on iPods in an open format.

My thought was to use it, at least for a few years, as a promotion device. Give the books for free to anyone who buys the $400 machine. (Maybe you can have 1,000 books of your choice, so there’s not a lot of ‘waste’.) You’ll sell more machines that way, that’s for sure. And the people willing to buy the device are exactly the sort of people that an author like me wants to reach.

Or what if Amazon gave you a free Kindle e-book version of every physical book you’ve ever purchased from Amazon?

Now available for sale, alongside a few demo videos. The most interesting technical aspect is the wireless data plan — you get free unlimited EVDO networking (but only EVDO networking) with no monthly plan. You buy a Kindle and you get free wireless EVDO for life, apparently. The weight and battery life seem impressive. There is no computer synching, period. It’s a wholly independent device. All content comes via the EVDO network, and if you lose or damage your Kindle, your purchased material can be re-downloaded from Amazon.

The on-screen typography seems crude. Interesting reading device — maybe. But replacement for the book? No way. The other thing they advertise is the ability to read “blogs”, where by “blogs” they seem to mean one of 250 pre-selected weblogs. Update: And you have to pay a few bucks a month to read them. So, uh, Kindle lets you pay money for something you can read for free everywhere else.

Also, the device is white, not beige as early mock-ups indicated. But the industrial design strikes me as very ’80s nonetheless. Maybe they should have stuck with beige for the retro vibe.

OmniFocus, The Omni Group’s task-management/to-do app that was first announced in September 2006, now has a ship date — 8 January 2008 — and a public beta is available now. It’s going to sell for $80, but it’s only $40 from now until the official release, and owners of OmniOutliner Pro get an extra discount.

Over the centuries, the sweet spot has been identified: something you hold in your hand, something you can curl up with in bed. Devices like the Kindle, with its 167 dot-per-inch E Ink display, with type set in a serif font called Caecilia, can subsume consciousness in the same way a physical book does. It can take you down the rabbit hole.

Sounds interesting, and 167 DPI is a very nice screen resolution. But if everything is set in the exact same typeface — if Kindle’s e-books are delivered as strings of text rather than as designed pages — then the Kindle will not replace books. I think PDF is the only feasible e-book format today.

Friday, 16 November 2007

When I say “end,” I mean it in the most “end-ish” sense. In Mac OS X 10.5, Netinfo is gone. Not “deprecated,” not “hidden away for only the most advanced users.” It’s gone. Deleted. It does not exist. No more Netinfo database, no more Netinfo Utilities such as nicl, no more Netinfo Manager. The entire structure for managing local users, groups, and other such things has been completely replaced by local Directory Services, and the Netinfo Database is now a series of XML files living in /var/db/dslocal/.

Fake Steve on GPL advocates who are pissed at Google for releasing Android under the “you can do whatever you want with it, including building non-open-source stuff on top of it” Apache license rather than the GPL. Hard to see why Google wouldn’t choose to use the GPL, given how many wonderful user experiences the GPL has led to.

What’s ironic is lots of other computer companies would LOVE to give me free stuff (I don’t take it) but Apple is the only company that’s never raised a PR finger to help me. Instead I feel so honored to spend my money on this crap. Why? Just to have a shiny machine?

Commoditizing the hardware will keep the price of Android phones
down, which is certainly desirable. But I fear they’re going to run
into the same quagmire that Windows Mobile has.

You don’t know if any given Windows Mobile device is going to have a
touchscreen, a QWERTY keyboard, a numeric pad, WiFi, cellular
access, Bluetooth, GPS… How can you design software that’s in any
way elegant for an unknown combination of hardware? How well would
the iPhone work if you couldn’t assume a touchscreen?

I’ve been thinking along similar lines — the coolest potential Android apps might only run on specific higher-end Android phones. And conversely, apps written to run on any Android phone, no matter how minimal the hardware, are likely to be uncool.

Zune 2.0 won’t knock the iPod off of its perch, but Microsoft performed a miracle nonetheless: It scrubbed the awful taste of Zune 1.0 out of my mouth.

(Is it just me, or is the paragraph at the very end a private note from Ihnatko to his editors at the Sun-Times, not intended for publication? Update: Apparently so, since it was yanked shortly thereafter. I saved an archive in Safari’s webarchive format here.)

Much more complete setup instructions than Google’s own. By mapping Apple Mail’s special folders (Drafts, Trash, Spam) to Gmail’s built-in special folders, the “right thing” just happens. E.g., all of your sent mail goes into the same Sent Mail mailbox, whether you sent it from Mail on your Mac, MobileMail on your iPhone, or Gmail’s web interface.

Not for the faint of heart, as it requires diddling with a plist file in the /System/Library/ folder — the “this stuff is not meant for users to diddle with” part of OS X. However, it works, by setting an environment variable that tricks WindowServer into disabling the translucent menu bar.

The original tip from Steve Miner suggests a setting of “1”; this results in an old-school pure white menu bar, which is what we had in the good old days, when we walked six miles to school through three feet of snow, and we liked it. A setting of “0” gives you a dark gray menu bar, and fractions in between 0 and 1 give you varying shades of gray. Commenters at MacOSXHints have deduced that a setting of “0.63” gives you a menu bar that looks pretty close, if not exactly, like the opaque menu bar Leopard shows on systems with older video cards.

Fixes Leopard compatibility issues (Lightroom 1.2 couldn’t print on Leopard) and adds support for a bunch of recent new cameras. Even better: Adobe has released a preview release of the Lightroom developer SDK. Someone ping Fraser Speirs.

Thursday, 15 November 2007

“No Country for Old Men” is as good a film as the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, have ever made, and they made “Fargo.” It involves elements of the thriller and the chase but is essentially a character study, an examination of how its people meet and deal with a man so bad, cruel and unfeeling that there is simply no comprehending him.

Saw it this afternoon and it’s just indescribably good. Can’t shake the feeling that it’s one of the best movies I’ll ever see.

(I would love if someone could explain to me exactly what happened, though, in the scene toward the end where Tommy Lee Jones goes into the motel room.)

I thought it was a pretty bold design decision when Apple discarded the iPod’s signature feature, the scroll wheel, in the iPhone and iPod touch. But the new scrubber bar is almost useless, especially for long tracks like podcasts where it’s impossible to move the playhead any less than a few minutes per hop.

So I thought I’d just fix it, or at least show a little idea of how Apple might fix it.

Please note that I have not had a chance to see and use the new MacOS [sic] X “Leopard” server release. Comments specific to Leopard Server here are, therefore, based on third party reports.

Please note that I have not bothered to read the rest of your “review”. My calling you a jackass, therefore, is based solely on the fact that you’ve published a comparison of software you admittedly haven’t even seen.

A slew of Macintouch readers are reporting problems with Safari 3 after updating to 10.4.11. A bunch of them report the problems go away after removing third-party input manager hacks. My guess is that third-party input manager hacks are the cause of nearly all these problems, and it’s just that some of these people don’t know or don’t remember that they have them installed. With regard to input manager hacks, this applies.

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.11 — the first time, to my memory, that they’ve released a point-upgrade to the previous Mac OS X generation after the release of a new one. The most significant change in 10.4.11 is that it now includes Safari 3.0 and a major new version of WebKit. Apple did the same thing with 10.3.9 and Safari 2. [Update: I was wrong; 10.3.9 didn’t include Safari 2, but it did include a significantly updated version of WebKit, with many of the rendering engine changes corresponding to Safari 2.]

Replacing WebKit is a rather significant change with potential compatibility ramifications. Recall, for example, that FileMaker was incompatible with Leopard until they issued a compatibility update, because it wasn’t compatible with Safari 3’s version of WebKit.

Mark Malone’s web site has some terrific demos of MobileSafari web design techniques. Things like creating iPhone-style buttons, changing the tap highlight color to something other than gray (-webkit-tap-highlight-color), fixing divs to the top and bottom of the viewport, and much more. A veritable gold mine.

But Android’s programs are written in Java, using Java-oriented IDEs (it also comes with an Eclipse plugin)… it just doesn’t compile the Java code into Java bytecode but (oops, Sun didn’t see this one coming) into Dalvik bytecode.

So, Android uses the syntax of the Java platform (the Java “language”, if you wish, which is enough to make Java programmers feel at home and IDEs to support the editing smoothly) and the Java SE class library but not the Java bytecode or the Java virtual machine to execute it on the phone (and, note, Android’s implementation of the Java SE class library is, indeed, Apache Harmony’s!)

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts.

I believe a major part of them problem is that Apple tried to make virtual desktops accessible to the average user. However, I think no matter how much spit, polish, and animation Apple puts on Spaces, virtual desktops is a power user feature. Spaces is broken because it is designed for the wrong user.

(I got a ton of email yesterday telling me I could solve my complaint by setting Safari to “Every Space” in the Exposé & Spaces pane in System Prefs, but that isn’t what I want at all. Yes, it avoids the problem where you get teleported to a different space by Command-Tabbing to or clicking the Dock icon of Safari, but setting Safari to “Every Space” means all open Safari windows are visible in every space. If I’m working on a certain project in space 2, I only want the Safari windows that pertain to that project to appear in space 2.)

Worth a re-link: A text filter I wrote a few months ago that makes writing — and especially revising — JavaScript bookmarklets much more pleasant. I use it with BBEdit, but it should work well with TextWrangler and TextMate, too.

With yet another op-ed column in The Times on this topic, which yet again does not refer to the other Times columnists who are debating the same issue, this is starting to get absurd. But I’m enthralled — it’s an angry, personal argument, but you have to be following along, and aware of The Times’s op-ed columnist policies, to see it.

On a conference call Monday, executives supported the view that Chizen’s move is more a personal decision than due to any financial or business reasons. In fact, Narayen said the company made the announcement that its fourth quarter would be positive in tandem with the executive news “to make it completely clear” that Chizen decided to leave and was not forced out of his post.

Long-time virtual desktop user Henry Story on what’s wrong with Spaces. I’ve never used virtual desktops regularly before, but I agree with his criticism — I’ve tried to love Spaces but can’t, because I want to divide spaces into tasks, and some apps, like my web browser, need to have windows in every space. If I’m in, say, space 3 and Command-Tab to Safari, I want Safari to activate in my current space, not jump me to whichever space contains the frontmost Safari window. In short, Spaces seems designed for app partitioning, not task partitioning.

For reasons I do not begin to understand, the combination of iTunes 7.5 and the 1.1.2 iPhone once again allow you to add custom ringtones without fussing with property lists and special software. Take any m4a file, thirty-seconds or less (although some report success with tracks up to 40 seconds), rename it to m4r and double-click to add it to iTunes. The file appears in your ringtones and can be synched — I tested this out myself — to your iPhone.

The time limit is actually 40.04 seconds, according to Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis. I really don’t get any of this: I don’t understand why the iPhone 1.1.2 update isn’t officially out yet, and I don’t understand why Apple has seemingly changed the terms on custom ringtone files again. This ringtone policy change is for the better, though, so I’m not complaining.

Joseph Crespino, historian at Emory University, on the context of the 1980 Ronald Reagan speech in Mississippi that New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and David Brooks have been awkwardly debating:

Brooks’s column, however, is a good example of conservatives’ discomfort with their racial history. Reagan is to modern conservatism what Franklin Roosevelt was to liberalism, so it’s not surprising that Brooks would feel the need to defend him. But Brooks’s throwaway remark that “it’s obviously true that race played a role in the GOP ascent” understates what actually happened.

Next year, I’m focusing exclusively on Waxy.org and related coding projects. What does that mean? Yes, more links, but also the same flavor of original research and investigative journalism I’ve done in the past, though on a daily basis instead of the quarterly (ack!) schedule I maintained this year.

Smaller, super-thin, lightweight MacBooks coming at Macworld Expo, says AppleInsider. How’s Apple making it so much thinner than current MacBooks? By eliminating the optical disk drive — i.e. what the iMac was to the floppy, this machine is to the CD/DVD drive. My Magic 8-ball says AppleInsider is mostly correct.

Update: I asked my Magic 8-ball if this upcoming super-thin MacBook still has a (non-Flash memory) hard disk drive, and the answer came back: “IT IS CERTAIN”. (iPod Classics have hard drives; they’re pretty thin.)

Rands really knows his nerds — this piece is probably a scarily apt description of most of you reading this. Jiminy:

He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.

Saturday, 10 November 2007

I was wondering if Paul Krugman would use his New York Times weblog to respond to David Brooks’s “Reagan’s 1980 speech in Mississippi wasn’t racist” column yesterday, and he has. But apparently the Times policy forbidding columnists from addressing one another in their columns extends to their weblogs, because, in the same way that Brooks never mentioned in his column that it was Krugman (and fellow Times columnist Bob Herbert) who’ve been making the charge that Reagan’s speech was an appeal to Southern racists, Krugman does not mention Brooks:

So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy.

It’s a reasonable general policy, but it’s making things awkward in this case, where they really are addressing each other’s arguments but can’t name each other.

From my comrade Dan Benjamin, a detailed guide to installing MySQL on Leopard (or Tiger, for that matter). More of an introduction to Unix nerdery on Mac OS X, with MySQL as the example, than just a simple article. Covers everything from compiling, setting up your .bash_login environment variables, to using launchd to start MySQL automatically.

He published more than 30 books, including novels, biographies and works of nonfiction, and twice won the Pulitzer Prize: for “The Armies of the Night” (1968), which also won the National Book Award, and “The Executioner’s Song” (1979).

He also wrote, directed, and acted in several low-budget movies, helped found The Village Voice and for many years was a regular guest on television talk shows, where he could reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.

msnbc.com launched a complete redesign last night, and it looks good. (It also works much better in Safari and Firefox than the previous design.) Alpha Channel is their also-new weblog, written by their design and editorial staff. Interesting behind-the-scenes stuff.

The device behaved like a three-year-old throwing a tantrum. Unless this is an especially buggy device, N81 has to be one of the worst Nokia phones I have ever used and would be loathe to recommend it to anyone.

My thanks to my friends at Joyent for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. I host Daring Fireball on a Joyent Accelerator, and it’s simply amazing — even under the highest traffic, the server doesn’t break a sweat. Accelerators are virtual containers optimized for Rails, Python, and PHP web apps, and give you root access for full control of the software. If you’re looking for serious web hosting, especially if you’re concerned about scaling, you should look at Joyent.

So there’s been an undercurrent of complaints that InDesign CS3 doesn’t work on Leopard; ends up that problem only occurs with pre-release versions of InDesign, and the complaints are from users with bootleg copies. If you’re surprised that people using illicitly-obtained bootleg software would complain vociferously when it stops working, you’ve never done tech support for commercial software. Software bootleggers have no shame about demanding tech support.

In 2001, Frederic Brochet, of the University of Bordeaux, conducted two separate and very mischievous experiments. In the first test, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine.

Speaking of Krugman, he makes the case in this weblog entry that Bush is not to blame for the falling dollar. So, for all of you who objected to my “Heck of a job, Bushie” quip regarding the dollar in September: You were right, I was wrong.

New York Times op-ed columnist in-fighting. This column by David Brooks, defending a 1980 campaign speech by Ronald Reagan in Philadelphia, Mississippi, is largely a response to fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has repeatedly referred to this speech as indication of Reagan’s appeal to Southern racists. But Brooks never mentions Krugman specifically, because Times policy forbids columnists from arguing with each other in print. Brooks makes a decent case, but I suspect it reads awkwardly if you don’t know (a) that Krugman has referred to this speech several times; and (b) that Times policy prevents Brooks from saying so.

There you have it: the Shadow, one of the least expensive smartphones on the market, loaded with features, feeling luxurious and looking stunning in your hand. For once, you don’t have to be jealous of the much cooler phones available in Europe.

But then you turn the thing on. […]

Frankly, Windows Mobile 6 is a mess. Common features require an infinitude of taps and clicks, and the ones you need most are buried in menus. Apparently the Windows Mobile 6 team learned absolutely nothing from Windows Mobile 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Thursday, 8 November 2007

Speaking of user-friendly firewall software, Objective Development (the crew behind LaunchBar) has released Little Snitch 2.0:

Little Snitch informs you whenever a program attempts to establish an outgoing Internet connection. You can then choose to allow or deny this connection, or define a rule how to handle similar, future connection attempts. This reliably prevents private data from being sent out without your knowledge.

I don’t run Little Snitch all the time, but when I want it, I’m glad it’s there.

The Firewall in Leopard is an Application Firewall. This type of firewall allows you to control connections on a per-application basis, rather than a per-port basis. This makes it easier for non-experts to gain the benefits of firewall protection and helps prevent undesirable applications from taking control of network ports that have been opened for legitimate applications.

I’m reluctant to link to it tonight because it’s apparently already blown past its API allotment from Twitter, but it’s too cool not to. Foamee is a new web app by Dan “SimpleBits” Cederholm that “helps track who you owe beers to (and vice versa)”. What’s novel is that the whole thing is built on top of Twitter. I’m not sure it’s going to work out, but it’s a damn clever idea.

One reason so many new image editors are spawning to take on Photoshop: the market is huge. Check out this photo Scott Kelby posted, taken at a recent New York City Photoshop seminar. (Via Duncan Davidson.)

Wednesday, 7 November 2007

Some graphics cards, such as an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200, may not have the necessary OpenGL capabilities to display a translucent menu bar even though they are compatible with Core Image. Those cards should render most effects, but not the translucent menu bar.

So the irony is that you get a better-looking menu bar with a crappier video card.

It’d be the tip of the year if there were a hidden defaults preference to use the no-translucency menu bar no matter what.

James Duncan Davidson addresses a topic close to my heart: monospaced screen fonts for Mac OS X. Me, personally, I’m still a Monaco 10px non-anti-aliased man. But if you prefer anti-aliasing even for coding fonts — and in our coming-someday-soon resolution-indepenedent future, we all will — there are a bunch of good options. My two favorites are Panic Sans, a Bitstream Vera Sans Mono derivative that Panic supplies with Coda, and Consolas, a new font from Microsoft designed by Lucas de Groot. The differences between Panic Sans and Vera Sans Mono are subtle, but are most noticeable (and welcome) in punctuation characters.

Ugo Cei, quoting Gerald M. Weinberg on how to set a price for one’s consulting/freelance services:

Set the price so you won’t regret it either way.

This basically means that you should not set the price so low, in order to get the assignment, that you’ll regret it if you obtain it. And you should not set it so high that you’ll regret it when the client is unable to pay it. Rather, you should set it so that you’ll feel about the same whatever happens. You shouldn’t feel too bad if you’re turned down and you shouldn’t feel too bad if you’re accepted, either.

No product details, no estimated ship date — but, still, despite my better judgment, I think this is true. If it ships, Apple’s certainly not going to call it a “tablet PC”, and my guess is it won’t be running Mac OS X, but rather another OS X offshoot with a UI and APIs specific to the device and its input methods. Could be the “one more thing” at Macworld Expo this January.

The only companies that join consortia are the ones who are too stupid or shitty to make a great product on their own. It’s like, Hey, we’ve got forty spazzo companies that can’t fuck their way out of a paper bag; let’s put them all together and maybe they’ll magically become some kind of big bad powerhouse. More likely it’ll just be some scary ass Frankenstein monster, walking around drooling and tripping over its own tongue.

And:

Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.

Corbis announced Tuesday that it is acquiring Canada-based stock distributor Veer, which appeals to designers with fonts, illustrations and trendy merchandise in addition to high-quality stock photography.

Corbis will operate Veer as a separate brand, a change in strategy that echoes competitor Getty Images.

They’re popping corks at Veer, so congratulations, and good for them. I’ve been a happy Veer customer for a long time. Here’s to hoping Veer remains an independent entity, not just an independent “brand”.

Monday, 5 November 2007

Blacktree.com is back after a recent outage, so anyone looking to re-download Quicksilver can get it once again. There’s also something new: Wildcard, a “virtual space” for card and board games. Wildcard is Leopard-only (and Intel-only, at least for now). Also new: the source code for Quicksilver (and Wildcard) is now open.

Peter N Lewis’s aforelinked naming trick works for folders in your Dock sorted by name; Matthew Yohe has a good trick for getting the same effect for folders sorted by date (like Downloads): set the modified date on the sub-folder to something far in the future.

The Leopard Dock shows folders as a layer of icons, which is crazy
for folders as you cannot easily recognize a folder based on its
contents. Especially crazy when the folders have recognizable icons
already!

Of course, here at Stairways we prefer to find solutions to problems
rather than just grumble, so here is a trivial solution. Simply
create an alias to the folder, name it to sort as the first icon,
and put it in the folder.

Is it just me, or has Google forgotten what making software means? Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for big companies taking on big problems, but maybe they should balance all these utopian announcements with some actual, you know, product releases.

Sounds like total vaporware to me — just an announcement and a list of partners, with phones based on this new platform not available until late 2008. Given that Google is only engineering the software, not hardware, it’s more of a rival to Symbian and Windows Mobile.

But jiminy, watch this “INtroducing Android” video from Google on YouTube — could it be any more vague? So far this seems like the most Microsoftian thing Google has ever announced.

Google-supplied developer libraries for their new “GData” APIs. Languages: Java, .NET, PHP, Python, JavaScript, and Objective-C. No C, no C++ — the only C family language is Objective-C. Interesting. (Thanks to Joe Bolte.)

Jesper, in the midst of arguing that Apple would be better off selling unlocked iPhones:

It’s not even economically debatable if Apple could sell the same iPhone for under $500. Of course they could, with margins too.

I think this is debatable. Isn’t it possible that the iPhone is, in fact, a subsidized device? What if it costs close to or more than $399 to produce, and it’s in the monthly revenue sharing from the carriers that Apple makes its profit? For one thing, it would explain why Apple seems so determined to foil unlockers, including their decision to no longer accept cash and limit you to two iPhones per purchase.

Update: A little birdie tells me that prior to the credit-only, two-per-person limit, it was not uncommon for would-be resellers to walk into the Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York with $50,000 in cash and walk out with 100 iPhones. Apple is turning these people away for a reason.

Update 2: The best evidence to the contrary — that iPhones might be profitable at $399 — is the $299 iPod Touch. I.e., if the iPod Touch is profitable at $299, then $100 extra for phone gadgetry sounds reasonable. I really don’t know what the answer is, I’m just saying it’s not clear either way.

“Apple’s day has finally come, and Apple users are going to get hit hard,”
security researcher Gadi Evron said. “OS X is the new Windows 98.”

It’s unfortunate, because this Trojan is an actual attempt by Ukrainian criminals to hijack Macs, but it’s not exploiting any sort of security hole in any version of Mac OS X. To get hit by it, you must (a) be the sort of moron who downloads “video codecs” from porno sites; (b) mount the disk image and launch the installer; and (c) grant the installer administrator privileges to install whatever it wants, wherever it wants on your system. No system can prevent that.

If anything, the fact that you have to manually install the software and supply your administrator password is a sign that Mac OS X security works.

Includes some real classics, like Hiawatha Bray declaring the original 1998 iMac “doomed” because it lacked a floppy disk drive, and of course Rob Enderle makes the list twice. But my favorite is then-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold’s statement regarding Steve Jobs’s return to the company: “Apple is already dead.” (Myhrvold eventually left Microsoft and has since become a patent troll.)

Sunday, 4 November 2007

One thing I’m impressed with about Apple’s new system GUI in Leopard is the “inset effect” on the text in combination with the new window chrome. […] So I’ve decided to investigate this subtle effect further via Photoshop layer effects as well as Illustrator’s effects.

Surely I’m missing something, but is there another store in the world that charges over $800 for a product that can be had for under $150?

It must be very profitable for Apple — i.e. that many people go ahead and pay Apple’s prices for RAM upgrades — because this is one of the few actual facts that lends credence to the “Apple kit is insanely expensive” notion.

Five new limited-edition, hot and spicy potato chip flavors from Kettle. It’s like being a beta tester for chips — you get pre-release flavors and then vote on which you like best. (Thanks to Cabel Sasser, who, like me, has already ordered his.)

Thursday, 1 November 2007

Delete an app after enabling Time Machine, then double-click a document assigned to that app, and a backed-up copy of the app in Time Machine will launch — which isn’t what you want if you really want to remove all traces of an app.

The Iconfactory’s excellent Mac client for Twitter hits 3.0 with a ton of new features, including support for displaying replies and direct messages in the tweet list (plus Sonic Twoosh Technology). See the release notes for a full change list. $15, or free with one ad per hour via The Deck.

My favorite apps, the ones that slip easily into everyday use and stick there, just start with plain text and add some extra sauce. VoodooPad is a great example, and Hog Bay Software’s new app TaskPaper is, too.

Looks like a huge upgrade to an already very cool blogging tool. I’m really impressed by how friction-free the Tumblr UI is — it’s easy to get started, and super easy to post. And the new version now supports Markdown.